Bold Marine Up For Top Military Job

He Has Stepped On Many People's Toes, But Clinton May Decide He Is What The Joint Chiefs Needs.

April 6, 1997|By Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — He has blasted the military's top-heavy bureaucracy, enraged the Air Force by appearing to put down air power and at times collided with his service's boss, the Marine commandant.

For this crockery-breaking candor, the Clinton administration may soon give Gen. John J. Sheehan a job usually reserved for calm, conciliatory personalities: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sheehan, the imposing 6-foot-2 Marine who runs the Norfolk, Va.-based Atlantic Command, has clearly caught the attention of reform-minded Defense Secretary William Cohen.

But before filling the post later this spring, Cohen and Clinton must wrestle with a few questions: Is picking a boat-rocker the best way to lead the military toward the change it sorely needs? And is Sheehan's brand of reform the same as theirs?

Sheehan, 56, a Boston native and decorated Vietnam veteran, faces a field of skilled and sophisticated rivals for the job.

Yet while others would be tiptoeing in a competition like this, Sheehan hasn't changed his outspoken ways. To the contrary.

In the past year or so, he has:

Annoyed some fellow Marines by arguing that Army units - rather than Marines - should be used on some aircraft carriers.

Denounced the huge concentration of 150,000 military personnel around Washington, pointing out that there are only 129,000 sailors in the entire Atlantic fleet.

Decried what he sees as the excess staffing of NATO, contending that only 15 percent of the command headquarters costs are needed for core operations.

Declared that the kind of low-cost, casualty-free overseas peacekeeping missions that some lawmakers and average Americans hope for simply ''can't be done.''

Sheehan has stepped on the toes of the chief of his own service, Marine Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak, by calling for a slimming of the corps' senior ranks just as Krulak was asking for more generals. (Krulak got his way.)

He has proposed that with no rival superpower in sight at the moment, the military should consider skipping the entire next generation of tactical fighters, saving billions of dollars.

And he has riled those who see the Air Force as the pre-eminent service in the new age of war by arguing that masses of ground troops will continue to be needed to resolve every war.